TL;DR – Hutch is an auditor. A man who assesses risks and consequences. If he perceives you as a risk, he’s happy to be the consequence.

Review (warning: spoilers)

Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) is nobody. Technically, this isn’t true. He’s a father of two kids, a husband to wife, Becca (Connie Neilsen), and holds down a day job as an office worker. So he’s somebody.

However, to police and law enforcement and Russian criminal syndicates, he’s a nobody. But that will change by the end of the movie.

When we’re introduced to Hutch, we sense straight away that he’s unhappy. There’s a lifelessness to him that comes from living a groundhog day existence repeating the same routine over and over again. He goes for a jog in the morning, takes out the garbage, makes a cup of coffee to go, catches the bus to work, clocks in at the metal fabrication company where he crunches numbers on a computer spreadsheet, clocks out, returns home where his kids mostly ignore him, and then goes to bed with no intimacy with his wife. On some days, he’ll vary his routine by doing chin ups at the bus stop shelter while staring at a poster of his wife who is a successful business woman.

The beginning sets wonderfully the struggle Hutch experiences with his mundane life. When one night two thieves break into his home and his son tackles one of them, Hutch has the opportunity to help and catch the thieves. Instead, he freezes and the thieves get away. When later Hutch is talking to his half-brother Harry over a radio in his office and reveals he let the thieves go because they were desperate and the gun they had wasn’t loaded, you realise Hutch is much more than he seems.

When his daughter can’t find her cat bracelet. Hutch springs into action, suspecting the two thieves and hunts them down to their apartment. But when he arrives, he discovers the thieves are parents themselves with a sick baby. Disappointed and angry, he leaves, takes out his frustrations on a brick wall and takes a bus home, bloody knuckles and all.

However, on the way, a bunch of hooligans crash their car at a red light. They’re drunk and stumble out to see the bus waiting at the intersection. When Hutch starts an inner monologue and begs the powers that be to let these hooligans onto the bus, you know Hutch will no longer be a nobody but a somebody. The scene unfolds as the thugs get on the bus and start harassing the passengers to the song I Gotta Be Me by Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme. When the gang singles out a young, female passenger, Hutch stands up with a grin, escorts the protesting bus driver out the front door and then turns around to face the thugs and proclaims in no uncertain terms that he’s going to send all these guys to the hospital (actually, he’s more blunt than that but you get the idea).

The fight scene had me on the edge of my seat and Hutch dishes out as much as he gets. It is by far the best action sequence in the entire film and carries immense weight because it’s the first time you see Hutch unleash the beast. It’s brutal, visceral, and completely spell binding. The camera work is brilliant and you can’t help but feel every hit to the face, dislocating bone, knife stab and breaking glass.

In the aftermath, Hutch feels alive. But what Hutch doesn’t know until later is that one of the thugs he treats as a nobody is actually a somebody also. Specifically, the thug is the younger brother of Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksey Serebryakov), a Russian crime lord that reacts as all crime lords would react when he finds out his younger brother is in hospital with a busted wind pipe, he sends an army to deal with Hutch and his family.

Derek Kolstad, writer of the John Wick series, also wrote Nobody and he has a knack for building suspense and unleashing mayhem. Odenkirk is perfectly cast as Hutch, and the disconnections (at the beginning) and connections (after the bus fight) with his family bring much needed depth to his plight. The scene where Hutch ushers his family down into the basement and the kiss he gives Becca is poignant and yearning. You’ll care about Hutch like you did with John McClane in Die Hard.

The final showdown at the factory has Hutch going MacGyver with an assortment of inventive traps to obliterate Yulian’s henchmen. It’s all a bit silly but by this point, you’re satisfied because of what has happened before.

One of the better action thrillers I’ve seen this year.

8 out of 10

TL;DR – straight forward action thriller with plenty of action but lacking the thrills.

Review (warning: spoilers)

Nothing annoys an assassin more than when the employer they work for sends them on an assignment without the proper intel. When Sam (Karen Gillan) is given a job by her employer, The Firm, and she’s told the target is not heavily guarded, only to find out that the target is heavily guarded, and she has to go all Rambo to get out alive, you can understand she’s peeved.

However, that’s not how The Firm sees it, and they give her another assignment in order for Sam to get back into their good graces. The target this time is a man who has stolen from The Firm. Sam hunts down the thief, shoots him in the abdomen, and then finds out that the man actually stole the money to pay a ransom for his daughter who has been kidnapped. The Firm, of course, doesn’t give a crap about any of this and just wants their money back.

Somewhere in the assassin’s playbook, or perhaps it’s an unwritten rule, you’re to be a mindless, efficient killing machine and not question any orders unless a child is involved (or a dog in case of John Wick). Then all bets are off.

But Sam doesn’t even need much convincing to go against her employer. She’s got mother issues from having been abandoned at the diner where she traditionally shared a milkshake with Scarlet (Lena Headey) who is also an assassin as well as Sam’s mother. So, the last thing she wants is to become like mommy-dearest by abandoning this girl to whatever grisly fate her kidnappers have in store. Also having killed the man who stole the money to save his daughter can leave even the most hardened hit-girl with a mountain of guilt.

The Firm also finds out one of the henchmen that Sam went Rambo on was actually the son of a powerful crime boss, Jim McAlister (Ralph Ineson). Naturally, The Firm wanting to smooth relations over with Jim and company, gives Sam’s location up. Who knew employer loyalty to their assassin proteges was so fleeting?

There’s plenty of potential across the board here. The cinematography is full of colour and quirkiness; Gillan gets to use a bowling ball, a panda bear suitcase and a giant ceramic tooth as weapons; girl-power is in full force as Headey, Angela Bassett (as Anna May), Michelle Yeoh (as Florence) and Carla Gugino (as Madeleine) all join in on the action; Paul Giamatti (as Nathan) plays the face of The Firm; Chloe Coleman (as the kidnapped Emily) is a revelation; and there’s much needed humour from Michael Smiley (as Dr. Ricky) and the three goofy assassins – Ivan Kaye (as Yankee), David Burnell IV (as Shocker) and Jack Bandeira (as Crow).

But for all the potential the story never delivers as it should and there’s way too many (or too long) slow-mo action shots. The trio of Anna May, Florence and Madeleine are under developed, and when Madeleine gets killed, it feels obligatory because one of the female assassins needs to die otherwise there’s no emotional pull… right? But it didn’t matter to me because it felt like they were simply padding out numbers.

The relationship between Scarlet and Sam is also never properly explored. You could remove Scarlet entirely from the story and just have Sam scarred as an abandoned girl at a diner, and you would still have the same film. Headey does what she can with what she’s given, but in the end, she’s like whipped cream on a milkshake; you can remove the whipped cream and still have a milkshake.

Director Navot Papushado has created a film that is more style than substance. Forget about all the plot holes (for example, the diner introduced in the first scene is meant to be neutral ground and no guns are allowed inside, but in the final scene the same diner is filled with every man and woman carrying a firearm), the film could have reached the thrills of a John Wick film even if it was unable to attain the lofty heights of Leon: The Professional.

With all the blood-letting and brutality, there was Tarantino-level action, but the film left behind the Tarantino-level dialogue that would have built the tension and made you care about the characters. Instead, Papushado appears more interested in ensuring each female character gets enough screen time for a slow-mo action scene.

5.5 out of 10

TL;DR – ludicrous plot, over-the-top action, and predictable = turn off your brain + pass the popcorn.

Review

Every now and then a sequel comes out that surpasses the original. The Godfather Part II, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens and The Dark Knight to name a few.

This movie sequel is not one of them.

Mind you, it never aims to be. Instead, it takes the first movie, throws in Salma Hayek and takes the road most travelled. Car chases, guns, gruesome deaths, and plenty of fist fights with the basic premise that somehow only a bodyguard suffering from mental health issues (Michael Bryce played by Ryan Reynolds) and an assassin that caused said issues (Darius Kincaid played by Samuel L. Jackson) can prevent a European meltdown concocted by bad guy (Aristotle Papdopolous played by Antonio Banderas).

All the cast (except Morgan Freeman) play their roles with relish. Reynolds and Jackson bounce off each other with enough chemistry that you remember why the first film gave you all those chuckles.

Salma Hayek plays the wife in the movie’s title, Sonia Kincaid, and the glimpses of her in the first movie is unleashed in the sequel with enough vitriol and censorship-be-damned dialogue that you won’t know whether to laugh or be shocked, but more than likely it’ll be a combination of the two.

Banderas is suitably smooth and slimy in equal measure as the terrorist seeking to collapse the European infrastructure. I won’t reveal his dastardly plans but I think the writers attempted a “Mission Impossible” type evilness but came off more “Austin Powers-Dr. Evil” type evilness. Nevertheless, Banderas uses his eyebrows with enough frown that you are never quite sure when he’s going to blow his lid.

This leads me to Morgan Freeman who plays Senior. The writers have Senior in this movie for a specific comedic reason. But once that comedic reason is revealed, his character is then meant to dive into a sort of relationship gravitas with Michael Bryce. These sequence of events are sorely lacking and Freeman, for all his acting genius, looks disinterested in trying to make more out of his role. Not that the writers give him much assistance in this regard either. It’s all rather ho-hum and leads to predictable twists that feel superfluous.

Overall though, if you switch off your brain, you can enjoy the ride as much as the first movie albeit with fewer laughs probably because you’re expecting them now.

6 out of 10